Chimes of a Lost Cathedral

by Janet Fitch

  Her smile widened. “Yes! With that adorable baby. Irish Eyes. How is she?”

  Oh, she remembered Iskra. My eyes smarted. I had to tell her, before my throat closed entirely. “She died this winter. That’s what the poem was about.”

  “Oh, baby…no.” She cupped my face in her hand. “This awful life.”

  She wore L’Origan, the only person in Petrograd these days who wore a scent. Perhaps it was just a memory of fragrance on her clothing, but I wanted to stand next to her and breathe it in forever, listening to her rich voice. If only I had found her before it was too late, before I’d marched off to Orphanage No. 6. If only this moment had come in the fall. But I had to be grateful it was happening at all. She knew us. Moura was translating for Gorky now.

  “So you’re a poet.” She brushed at my hair, tenderly. “Of course I couldn’t understand most of it, but the music! Glorious! Why didn’t you ever come see me?”

  I didn’t want it to sound like I was blaming her. “You needed a propusk. I had no way to reach you.”

  “Propuski,” she said, her mobile face contorting with disgust. “I never saw such a country for red tape.”

  I laughed. “Yes, that’s our color. The Astoria’s the First House of the Soviet. They can’t let the riffraff wander about—some ragged, raving poet who might read free verse and bring down the government.” I didn’t want to clutch at her arm with my sad story, like a beggar.

  Moura laughed and translated for the others.

  “Well, I’m not there anymore,” Aura said. “I’m at Gorky’s and you must visit me. You won’t need a passport and twelve official stamps. You will come, won’t you? You must.” She turned to Moura. “Tell her she must.”

  Moura Budberg seconded the invitation. Her English was plummy, British—even her Russian was accented. I wondered what her story was as she leaned toward Gorky. “She must come to visit, we’re going to adopt her—is that all right, Alexei Maximovich?”

  “It would give me great pleasure.” A jolly man, a man who I could see liked bustle around him. I wished he would take care of that coungh. He was smoking too.

  “Come, then. Sunday. At four?” said Moura. She told me the address—Kronverksky Prospect 23, flat number 5.

  Aura kissed me on both cheeks. “I’m so glad we’ve found you at last.”

  “I look forward to following your career,” said Gorky as they moved off. “I hope to see you on Sunday, if they haven’t killed me first.”

  “Thank you, I’ll be there,” I called after them. If I wasn’t in a Cheka cell by then.

  We continued celebrating up in Anton’s room, comparing notes, who had said what to whom, who had been there, whether Tomilin or Eikhenbaum would review us, Anton analyzing our performances, Arseny careening off the walls with the adrenaline of his own success. “We did it, we pulled it off! Did you see those stinkers, Gumilev et al.? Gnashing their teeth. Ha! Let them go off and knit their antimacassars.”

  Tereshenko had found a little bit of vodka, God knows where—we passed around the perfume bottle he kept it in. We even persuaded Oksana to stay a few minutes. She and Petya Simkin, part of the Squared Circle, sat next to me on the crowded bed. How far we’d come since our days at the Krestovskys’. Everybody but Tereshenko had been there when we’d celebrated the end of the war—just before the White advance. “Just think,” I said, rosy on a few drops of alcohol, taking Oksana’s hand. “We will always be connected in people’s minds, ‘The Women of the Squared Circle.’ Someday we’ll be old ladies drinking tea with our cats in our laps, remembering that horrible Anton Chernikov.”

  “Who made your fortunes,” Anton added.

  “What a time this has been,” Oksana’s hand squeezing mine. “I already feel like I’m fifty, don’t you?”

  “I still remember those geraniums,” I said. The ones she’d brought to my Red wedding. We would share each other’s futures and disgraces.

  “It looks like Galina’s done well for herself.”

  “Some cats always fall on their feet,” said Tereshenko, always happy to be nasty.

  “I hate to go but I teach in the morning.” Oksana brushed her fair hair back from her amused gray eyes, stood. A philology student at Petrograd University, she was already teaching at the Third University, the Workers’ Faculty—Rabfak. Petya rose to accompany her—reluctantly. It was a wild walk back to Vasilievsky in the dark.

  I watched them go with a twinge of envy. If my father hadn’t ruined my chances to enter the university, I too would be leaving now, getting ready to teach in the morning, instead of facing another day plugging cords into sockets at the infernal telephone exchange. But that was a horse dead for too many years, there were only a few scattered bones left to trip me.

  More and more people crammed into Anton’s tiny, messy room, spilling out into the hall. Nikita sat down in Oksana’s seat, told me that Eikhenbaum was going to write up the evening. Such a heady time, I could hardly sit still, as bad as Arseny ricocheting off the walls. Was I not dreaming? And so what if Varvara knew I was in town? I’d face that when I had to. Surely she understood the poems, could see I had not survived unscarred. But would it be enough to pacify her? Pity was not her strong suit.

  Here was big blond handsome Sasha, leaning over, kissing me. He always smelled of linseed oil and turps. “Look who’s here!”

  From behind his broad back, holding his hand, was Dunya Katzeva.

  “Marina,” she said.

  I wanted to bolt, like a convict leaping from a train. Her brown hair in crisscrossed braids the way Mina used to wear it. She crouched down in front of me. “Marina, I didn’t know. Not until tonight.” Her face was pale, her dark eyes large and wet. “I’m so sorry. You don’t know, we had a huge fight after you left. I moved out.” She knelt on the floor, holding my hands. “Everyone hates her. Mama hardly speaks to her. It’s just her and that horrible Roman now. I kept thinking you’d come back, and we could make it right, but you never did. Forgive me, forgive me!”

  Oh, why did she have to show up tonight? I just wanted to have my little scrap of pleasure that had nothing to do with losing my green-eyed baby.

  “Was it typhus? Forgive me, it doesn’t matter…”

  I would not cry in front of these people, please, God! Dunya, why are you doing this? I explained tersely the bare bones of what had happened.

  She clutched at my hand, covered it with her tears. Did I have to comfort her? I could see Inna Gants eagerly watching this little drama from the corner of the room. The House of Arts was a fishbowl, as bad as the collective apartment on Shpalernaya Street. Living here must be like being on stage. I had to end this ghastly scene. She’d been wrong, I’d been wrong, we’d all been wrong, and not a scrap of it would bring Iskra back.

  She gazed up at me from the floor with her big wet eyes…sweet and kind, she’d always been this way, even as a child…and there was no virtue in salting the wound. Suddenly I hated it here, all these people in the crowded, smoky room, everyone half performing. I wanted to get outside and breathe, be alone with my jumbled thoughts. “We were all idiots,” I said. I put my hand on her shoulder. I’d known her before she lost her first tooth. “None of us is a fortune-teller. I’m sorry, I have to go too, it’s a long walk and I work in the morning. Night, Comrades,” I called out to the poets.

  “Sasha, we’re walking Marina home,” Dunya announced, rising from the dirty floor.

  Anton glanced up from Arseny and his beloved Shklovsky. I was surprised he’d heard anything. “You can’t go, it’s still early.”

  “It’s late,” I said, and kissed him three times. “Thanks for including me tonight.” For saving me, for bringing me in. He looked stricken to see me go, as if I were taking the party with me. “I’ll see you next Wednesday.” The others shouted their congratulations.

  There was no shaking my escorts. But outside in the quiet hissing of the rain, I felt less oppressed by Dunya and her sorrow. After all, I loved her better than all the other pe
ople in that room put together. She was the only one with an umbrella, and none of us had galoshes—what an ill-prepared trio. Huddled together, splashing down the dark streets of Petrograd in our sad boots, like the fools we were. Now that I could see how it was with Dunya and Sasha, it softened my heart. Still together through everything. They had their mythology, kisses and misunderstandings, the old days when the Transrational Interlocutors had taken advantage of the Katzevs’ generosity, like stray cats being fed by the back fence. Dunya had had such a crush on the big painter, and Sasha unsure what to do about the love of such a young girl. The city map of their courtship. Well, something good had come of all that. Why shouldn’t life work out at least for some?

  And me? I might always be alone, as my mother had foretold, but still there would be friendship. And my verses were becoming known. There was no longer Arkady to fear, and Varvara would do what she would. Whose fault was life? I didn’t know, only that I was glad for the companionship of these lovers and the freshness of the rain. We chatted the whole way back to Shpalernaya Street. And when I lay down to sleep, I was happy, safe for tonight in my little room, soothed by the whisper of rain on the window. I fell asleep smelling L’Origan, clutching my future in the palm of my hand.

  34 The Flea

  It was a clear, fresh April day, the wind driving the white clouds down toward the gulf against the blue silk of the sky. Blue reflected in a million puddles. The ice on the River Neva broke all at once. In two or three days it went from a white solid mass to violently cracking towers of slabs that heralded the onset of spring. I expected to see whales breaking through, leaping into the air, as I crossed the Troitsky Bridge over to the Petrograd side. The sun on my face, the shush and slap of the water, freed from the paralysis of ice. The wind tore at my hair. Fortunately my fur hat was non-aerodynamic. Someone else was not so lucky, her hat flew off her head—how joyous, a loose hat!—as if it were tired of its responsibilities and decided to take off for a new perspective.

  I felt like I could fly, just like that, tumbling into the sky. I was going to tea at Maxim Gorky’s—Alexei Maximovich’s—in my patched woolen stockings and sheepskin coat. I laughed out loud. How alive the day was. New shoots on trees, plants coming up right in the middle of Palace Square, no horses to eat them—the restoration of Nature’s green after her long imprisonment in the halls of the Frost King. Then, miracle of miracles, I heard the tram coming—screeching and groaning, passengers hanging from its doors like clusters of grapes. I jumped onto the fender and rode, though truthfully I could have walked it faster.

  As we shuddered and groaned, the Peter and Paul Fortress rose up on its small island in the Neva, the crown-shaped embankments, the very first structure that Peter the Great built here—a fortress, a cathedral, a mint, and a prison, all in one. Gorky had been jailed there after the 1905 Revolution. How strange that he would want to live so close by, have to pass it every day. I watched its great yellow-gray walls coming closer, the Dutch-style needle of its cathedral glinting gold, communing with its brother across the river at the Admiralty. I remembered the night it fired on the Winter Palace. Long the dungeon of the autocracy, its cells now held hostages and enemies of the revolution.

  Swaying and clinging and trying to avoid being hit in the eye by the man to my left, whose elbow curved just above my face, I gazed back at the fortress, so familiar, so grim.

  I still had not heard from Varvara. She wasn’t stupid. She had to know everything by now, where I lived, where I worked, that I was using Kuriakina on all my papers. It was more a matter of when than if. Well, it would come when it would come. I would not run from my fate. Write while you can, Blok had said. My life had started to take root and bloom, and I would enjoy these moments of springtime, no matter how short they might prove.

  Now came the sweep of the Kronverksky Embankment with its trees, blue sky reflected in the bow-shaped canal behind the fortress—the way to the zoo, as every St. Petersburg child knew. But today I would not be seeing mere lions and elephants. Today was for opera singers and great authors. At Kronverksky Prospect, I swung down, stumbling a bit on the stones. I began to walk—not fast; no one liked an early guest—into the afternoon sunshine.

  Kronverksky Prospect, 23, was a big five-story bourgeois building facing the park. I could smell the fresh grass, the new leaves—and could not help thinking, Iskra would have loved this park. This was my life from now on. I would always look at green and think of her. “Irish Eyes.” The building was in far better shape than any I’d seen in some time—the hall lights worked, the carpet lay intact, muffling the sound of my boots. The banister practically boasted its solidity. They even had a concierge, although all she wanted to know was where I was going. “Flat five. Madame Budberg invited me.” That seemed to be sufficient for the stolid dezhurnaya. I wished she was more rigorous—I could have been an assassin, I could have been anyone. For us, Alexei Maximovich was the most important man in Petrograd, far more important than Zinoviev, chairman of the Northern Commune, and anyone could walk in and shoot him at any time.

  I ran up to the second floor, rang the doorbell of the flat opposite the staircase, heard the buzz resonate deep inside.

  Aura herself answered the door. Today she was glorious in a sky-blue suit, her hair pinned in a simple chignon. She could have been wearing a robe and a diadem, so queenly did she appear. It was like Nefertiti landing on our cold Neva shores. “Marina, you made it at last.” She kissed me on both cheeks, à la française, her perfume tinting the air. “They’re all in the dining room.”

  I followed her clicking heels and solid hips into the depths of the large private flat, decorated with heavy, old-fashioned furniture, plates, and dark paintings. The size of it! It just went on and on. I eagerly peered into every open doorway—a study, a sitting room…Alas, most of the doors were closed. A big old intelligentsia household. I could smell food. My stomach growled.

  “You haven’t eaten, have you?” she asked.

  You never had to ask whether someone had eaten. These days, one could eat a Petrograd dinner and then another one five minutes later, and one after that, and still have room for a feast.

  We entered a large dining room in which a number of others were chatting, though no Gorky, no Moura. Were they not going to join us? Aura introduced me in her wobbly Russian. Evidently I was a completely beautiful writer. It was something I’d noticed about her—nothing was just okay. Everything was superlative, the most marvelous, beautiful, spectacular. Stupendous! No Russian could be so enthusiastic, even on marafet. She introduced Lajos something, the most marvelous Hungarian mathematician, and his son Tamás, and the poet Khodasevich’s darling niece Valentina, and a set of the sweetest visiting Gorky cousins, a man and a woman, and this most distinguished Eugene Harris from the British Trade Union delegation. I marveled at how many people Gorky could afford to feed.

  Aura seated me between herself and Harris at the far corner of the table—a little enclave of English speakers among the Russians. The British comrade’s ears stuck out, his moustache was small and bristly. “So when will the revolution come to England, Comrade?” I said, half teasing.

  He sighed. “Lenin asked me that when I was in Moscow. All I can say is that it’s heating up. But more like a Petrograd tram than the Zurich Express.”

  “Lenin asked me too,” said Aura, settling into the seat next to mine, her arm across my chair. “‘When will we see red flags fly over Wall Street, Comrade Sands?’ I told him, ‘Vladimir Ilyich, if there’s a revolution in America, I’ll be the first one going back. But it’s the only way you’ll get me on that boat.’”

  “Do you hate America so much?” I asked, thinking of our wonderful trip to New York, my father giving a talk at Columbia University. My nine-year-old impression was of terrifying skyscrapers, crowds, the Brooklyn Bridge. I remember dining with my mother’s brother Vadim and his glamorous lady friend, and especially her hat, more vertical than horizontal, pinned to the side of her dark hair. White straw,
faced in black taffeta. The most elegant thing I ever saw.

  “When your country’s against you, it’s not hate.” Aura’s lips curled inward. “It’s more of a love that’s been trampled. Like being rejected by your own mother. Like being turned out onto the street by your family.” She couldn’t know how familiar I was with that feeling. Yes, it wasn’t hate. It was pain. “I’m a Negro,” she said. “This doesn’t wash off.” She licked a finger and rubbed the back of her hand to stress the point. “I can sing at La Scala, dine at Maxim’s, I can have a million dollars in the bank, but I still can’t stay in a decent hotel in New York. Not only can I not sing at the Metropolitan Opera, I can’t appear onstage with a fourth-rate white tenor in a tenth-rate hall in a two-horse town anywhere in the U.S. of A. Tell me, how could a sane person live in a country like that?”

  Yes, it must be enough to drive a person mad. “But you could live in France,” I said. “Drink aperitifs on the terrace at La Rotonde.” As I would love to be doing. “Why get involved in our problems?”

  “Because I believe in the revolution,” she said, her golden-brown eyes flashing. “This is for all of us, not just you. So my father doesn’t have to step off the curb when a white man walks past. So the people who do the work are the ones who profit. Who wouldn’t want to be part of it? You’d have to be dead not to want to be here.”

  For the first time in quite a while, I remembered the revolution as more than deprivation, suspicion, and terror. She made me remember the other side of it, what we’d already accomplished in only three years—and we were almost done with the civil war, the Whites had clearly lost. Maybe the West would soon recognize the fact of us and drop the blockade. A few years of peace to mend and feed ourselves, repair our factories and railroads, and we’d see what Communism really could do.